Digital Healthcare Delivery Reimagined – with Minimal Risk.

One of the things that has really struck me lately with some very large prospects is there reluctance to change. While everybody is content to talk about change, when it comes down to executing on it there’s nothing but ‘crickets’.

So as usual I asked myself why five times. Which resulted in the attached three slides – the last one is the focus of this post.

If I asked a healthcare CEO if he/she would like to save $70m a year or $1B a year the answer would be obvious. On face value the $1B wins every time. However that’s NOT the whole story. While digging in with those large prospects we learned that when it came to execution, those tasked with it had almost no room to innovate. 90% plus of their budgets were already used up by headcount and so introducing ’transformative change’ was simply a non starter.

So what does this mean – the $70m proposal is likely to get more traction than the $1B proposal because when it comes to change incremental is seen as less risky and more achievable than transformative. So tactically it’s just easier to execute on incremental change due to the level of risk.

However the savings only ever amount to one or two percent which can easily disappear in other parts of the business. In days of old this used to be enough – unfortunately times are a changing – costs are exploding, margins are declining and as they descend below 1.5% insolvency looms.

If I was a healthcare CEO I would be looking at those declining margins and hunting hard for transformative change – but for the business and operational requirements I would look for a solution that allows for incremental steps to be taken first, so as to reduce overall execution risk followed by ‘unlimited upside’.

And therein lies the core design philosophy of Choice®.

Our model allows for incremental change with a transition to transformative change with minimal risk. There is no change to existing infrastructure, there is no need to increase or decrease headcount, there is instead the ability to drive new operational efficiencies for each part of the value network.

The winners will be those that embrace change with a ‘side of downside risk mitigation’, the others will continue to support incremental change and hope for a miracle to occur to reverse declining margins.

Remember ‘hope’ is not a strategy, and these days miracles are in short supply.